The Convict and Other Stories

He crouched on his knees in the bullpen and caught for the crippled boy. Every third or fourth pitch he reminded the boy to throw his leg out and come over with his arm, and after a half hour he had the boy burning them into the mitt, one delivery after another, hard, low, and inside.

“Those are real smokers, partner,” the professor said. “And now we’re going to teach you the change of pace. All you got to do is hold it in the back of your palm and pull the string on it and you’ll make a batter’s scrotum come out his mouth.”

“You really think I’ll get good enough to start in a game?”

“You’re good enough now, pal.”

When the boy’s arm tired they joined a pepper game, and the professor bunted the

ball across the grass to a row of five boys, all of whom knew him only as the guy who had flattened Pork Butt’s tire. As he threw the ball up and knocked it shorthanded into a fielder’s glove, he felt a pleasure that he hadn’t known in years. What was more natural, he thought, than playing baseball with boys?

But what was more unnatural, he also thought, than his Tuesday-morning general-literature class? The students had changed and he didn’t understand them anymore. Or maybe the problem was that there wasn’t much out there to understand. They were bored with the material, bored with him, bored with themselves. If they had a common facial expression, it was a remoteness in the eyes and a yawn that not even the apocalypse could disturb. They wanted to be court reporters, cops, and computer programmers, but few of them could explain why. On some mornings when it was obvious that no one had read the material, he tried to talk about other things: trout fishing, baseball, folk music, clean air, mental health. But there was no way to violate that encompassing yawn.

On this morning he was discussing “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” He wanted to be fair to Tennyson, but this particular poem always bothered him because its content had nothing to do with the reality of war, and it was this kind of romantic blather that replaced memory and provided the delusions that the manipulators used so well. But he contained his feelings and simply said, “Tennyson was a great craftsman, and actually a great poet, but the sentiment in this poem is what made some critics accuse him of intellectual poverty.”

Then the hand went up from one of the three boys in class who wore ROTC uniforms.

“If he was a great poet, how could he be intellectually poor at the same time?” the boy said.

“Sometimes Tennyson wrote for newspaper publication, and he didn’t invest a lot of thought in what he said.”

“What is intellectually poor about this poem?”

“Namely that there’s nothing grand in sending hundreds of men to die in an artillery barrage.”

“They had a choice, didn’t they? Maybe they felt they were giving their lives for something.”

“My point is that Tennyson does not describe what actually took place on that field. He doesn’t write about the scream of the chain and grape in the air or the men who are disemboweled in the saddle or the fear that makes their urine run down their thighs.”

He was going beyond the limits of the classroom now, and he swallowed and tried to hold back the words that were breaking loose like lesions in his head.

“Okay, but they were there for a reason,” the boy said. “Why does a poem have to be antiwar to be good?”

“Forget about this damn poem.” The professor leaned over the podium and pointed his finger at the boy. “When you put on that uniform, that costume, you help another man dig your grave.”

He could hear his own breathing in the room’s silence. He swallowed again and looked out the window at the blueness of the mountains. “Hey, it’s spring. You guys go drink beer in the park today or watch the tulips grow, and I’ll see you Thursday,” he said.

He made a pretense of putting his papers together and prayed that nobody would stop by the desk so that he would have to raise his eyes.

. . .

Two hours later the department secretary handed him a message. The dean of humanities would like to see him at one o’clock.

The dean was a heavy man both physically and mentally. He tried to keep his weight down by playing handball, but he only got more thick-bodied as a result, and the black hair on his arms and chest made him look simian behind his desk. He was a pragmatist, and no matter how irrational the current educational psychology was, he quickly acclimated to it and made it his. Certificates of administrative merit and student artwork that could have been painted by blind people were hung all over his office walls. The professor thought of these as appropriate symbols for the dean’s ability to collect everything that was worthless in modern education.

“Well, I got another complaint,” the dean said.

“From an ROTC kid in my general-lit class.”

“No, this one’s from two girls, but they’re in the same class.”

At least the ROTC kid is a stand-up guy, the professor thought.

“They say you use the class for your own ideas and you run people down.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I have to deal with the complaint.”